Saturday, August 28, 2010

I said yesterday that there was one Western which really was total trash, indeed an offence to the genre.I have so far reviewed over 100 Westerns in this blog, the good, the bad and the downright lousy. And there are hundreds still to come. I have reviewed trash spaghettis, Eurocrap 'Westerns', serials, B movies, one-reeler silents, low-grade pulp and made-for-TV dross designed to fill up the schedules. They all have something. There's a saving grace. The spaghettis had shocking color, lousy plots, Z-grade dialogue, appalling music and so on but maybe they had Lee van Cleef in the lead or one good shot of a horseman on a skyline. Something.When I review Westerns, I give them a rating, from 1 to 5 revolvers. Mighty epics and towering leaders of the genre get 5. The Searchers, High Noon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, that kind of thing.

As for 2-revolver pictures, they are maybe worth seeing by Western fans or have good features - maybe a fine actor or photographer, maybe a well-written screenplay that kind of thing, but they aren't top-drawer stuff that you need to have with you on a desert island. Some of them have fatal weaknesses. El Dorado, The Indian Fighter, Vera Cruz.But everything gets at least one. After all, they have made a Western. That deserves a reward on its own. They have added to the genre. Maybe they tried hard or maybe they were just exploiting. It doesn't matter. A Western gets 1 revolver. All those spaghettis, Johnny Mack Brown B films, total turkeys like How The West Was Won or The Rare Breed. Anything.Well, almost anything. Apache Blood, aka A Man Called She and Pursuit, is an extra-low-budget, very badly directed, boring film with rotten actors. It is almost a silent movie because there is little or no dialogue. Perhaps it was shot in VHS or perhaps the very low quality of the print I saw was a result of VHS being transferred to DVD. Anyway, it’s lousy.The music is annoying.A fat scout (Dewitt Lee) is pursued by a thin Apache (Ray Danton) and hobbles across Arizona for 89 interminable minutes. Danton is called Yellow Shirt because he wears a yellow shirt (but no trousers). There is a really stupid ending, then we are obliged to watch ‘highlights’ all over again in flashback.It’s an ultra-low-quality exploitation flick with art pretensions that it dismally fails to live up to. It is the only film I have ever reviewed to receive no ‘revolvers' at all. You might think, well, if it’s that bad, I might watch it, for fun. Take my advice. Don’t. Just trust me. That way you won’t be mentally scarred.